Lost in Starlight Review
Director: Han Ji-won
Date Created: 2025-05-30 14:00
4.5
Lost in Starlight Review: Netflix Korea’s first animation feature film, 이 별에 필요한, from director Han Ji-won, who also co-wrote alongside Kang Hyun-joo, marks the streaming giant’s big leap into the world of the animation feature film. With a runtime of 1 hour and 36 minutes, this visual feast gets back together a great voice cast (Kim Tae-ri as Nan-young and Hong Kyung as Jay). It’s the sort of movie that will mix the up-close disappointment of human contact with the far-flung aspirations of ambition across the solar system and end up with an arch plot of romantic melodrama set in a high-tech Seoul of the 2050s.
Lost in Starlight Review
Netflix’s Lost In Starlight, also known as I Byeol-e Pil-yohan, is a love story with elements of dreams and the harsh realities of the pursuit of dreams intertwined with love: love at first sight, love at any cost, first kisses, hunger, and sacrifices that come along. Nan-young is an astronaut who dreams of going to Mars. Jay, a musician embittered by the fact that he lost his creative spark. And the two collided in unexpected ways and developed a relationship that is at once as inevitable as it is tenuous, an echo of so many life stories in which timing is the most card-carrying villain.
The opening shot is that signature on the dotted line. This is not a technical extravagance, but a project of passion. The 2D animation is gorgeous. Every frame has a hushed, ethereal radiance that draws you in from the beginning. What I adored the most was how closely the animators walk the line between futurism and emotional grounding, for instance. With sci-fi it’s difficult not to get swept up in the spectacle, but in the Lost In Starlight movie, its visuals are never larger than the emotional stakes.
The worldbuilding here is just what I enjoy. Naturally, 2050 Seoul is teased with utopian glamour (floating cars, holographic entertainment, and architectural hotness are all on display), but it’s not the kind of place that’s cold or impersonal. Rather, you inhabit this world, in this properly toasty and snug world — grayscale and wet and vivid, yes, but most certainly warm, most certainly fuzzy, most certainly permitting you to do this and to imagine in rich detail what life might actually be like in some future that felt like this. This is not a dystopia or warning story, but a portrait of progress that has gone on and on, believing in human storytelling.
And what a human tale it is. Nan-young and Jay’s romance plays out well and naturally. It isn’t melodramatic, and it doesn’t have to raise the stakes. Instead, it introduces its themes of ambition vs. love, and of how often life forces us to have to choose between what we want and whom we want. For some reason, I was drawn to their moments of contact, not because they were noticeably flashy, but were real enough, to me at least. It’s a thin kind of balance, made almost tolerable by the fact that Nan-young’s ambitions have the potential to carry her light-years away from the life they’ve constructed together.
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All that notwithstanding, the setup itself isn’t that new. Particularly if you’ve ever watched sci-fi romance drama in the past, you will anticipate where the story is heading. We already know that there will be an inevitable confrontation and a bittersweet goodbye, too. But what interested me was how the story was told and not what the story was. So if the story does feel overly familiar, there is the immersion within this culture, the voice authenticity of its voice acting and something like a plainspoken emotional truth that gives it its own voice.
Coming to the voice acting, my God, Kim Tae-ri and Hong Kyung are fantastic. Nuanced and raw performances by the two thespians. You can hear it in the voices — the ambivalence, the longing and, in the whispered snatches, the suppressed pain. I am someone who has always loved their careers in kdrama, and now I am really impressed by how their voice feels effortless and the way it transitions into animation. Their chemistry is palpable even in the absence of in-the-moment cues; your sense of them as a couple is very physical.
I also adore the film’s unvarnished embrace of its Korean-ness. It’s a too-rare sentiment within a dominant mode of global release that dilutes cultural specificity for mass consumption. Not so here, and the producers take no shortcuts. From the cityscapes to the quick cultural nods buried in the dialogue, it’s the story of a place drenched in Korean culture and sensibility. It’s an opulence that permeates the animated movie Lost In Starlight’s air more than its influencers in the Western world.
Korean Movie Lost In Starlight Review: Summing Up
Overall, I just love Lost In Starlight. And it is rare in the world of animated feature films to venture into adult places (personal compromise, longing, the cost of ambition) with such grace and emotion. I came in looking for an old-fashioned visual epic, and while I got that, I also got emotionally waylaid by the film, as I did not expect to run that deep. For a debut animated feature from Netflix Korea, Lost In Starlight film, is a strong statement that clearly says that they can excel in animation as well.
Lost In Starlight 2025 is now streaming on Netflix.
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